'That's not easy, Bill… '
'It's not supposed to be easy, for fuck's sake. Nothing is easy when an American government servant has been murdered.'
Rutherford swivelled his chair. Rutherford's body was positioned between Erlich and the floor safe… Good form, so that he couldn't see the combination that Rutherford used on the dials, typical… Rutherford turned back. He opened the file that he had taken from the safe. Rutherford was turning pages, not offering them for Bill to read.
' H e has a Military Cross.'
' S o? '
' H e has the Croix de Guerre.'
' S o? '
'They are gallantry medals. They aren't the sort of decorations picked up in little adventures down in Panama or Grenada, or for cocking up in Beirut. Here, he's a war hero, that would be how we would regard Major T u c k. '
'His son's a killer.'
'We don't know that for certain.'
'Well, I know it. I can't prove it of the Athens killing, though I am sure of it, but I am one hundred per cent sure of it of the Clapham killing.'
'Bill, I'm sorry, it's not by any means certain that Colt shot Saad Rashid.'
'I have an eyewitness, dammit.'
'Who is not saying to the Anti-Terrorist Branch what you say she said to you. Nevertheless… '
'They don't know their business.'
'Nevertheless…, I will request on your behalf a 'hostile interrogation facility' with Major Tuck. I will also, and you're pretty damn lucky for that, accompany you down to that nasty little village so that we can conduct surveillance without you falling on your face in the mud, so that the Embassy of the United States doesn't run too short on transport.'
There were times, yes, in the small brick bungalow in the foreigners' compound that he dreamed of walking away from the danger and the fear. Occasions, now, when he took his twice annual leave to Europe and met with the Mossad men and did not have the courage to tell them, face to face and one to one, that his nerve was exhausted. He thought it would require more courage to quit than to go on.
He had guessed that from the first day of his arrival at Tuwaithah, and from the first day that he had used the courier.
He was cut out from the courier. The cut-out was a post-restante box at the new Post Office on Al Kadhim Street in the old Juafir district of the city. He had a key to the post-restante box, and the courier had a matching key. They would never meet.
He read the message. He came once a week to Baghdad and shopped and look lunch at the Ishtar Sheraton, and walked across the Jumhuriyah Bridge and towards the old circled city and into the new Post Office on AI Kadhim Street.
He drove back towards Tuwaithah.
They had never before asked the chemical engineer from Sweden for more complete information.
They were all Grade 5 and Grade 6. All divisional heads and their Superintendents.
They were from Mechanical Engineering and Weapons Electronics and Assembly and Special Projects, from Applied Physics and Materials, from Chemical Technology and Explosives and Metallurgy. Reuben Boll and Basil had come over to F area from Mathematical Physics in H3. Twenty men and women had gathered at the Security Officer's summons, and there was coffee and biscuits.
Not one among them, none of these senior engineers and chemists and scientists, would have claimed that he was glad of a summons to the Security Officer's conference room. They all worked in areas of great secrecy. Their papers were marked with the highest classification used at the Ministry of Defence, Top Secret (Atomic). They were subject to positive vetting. They were encouraged not to discuss their work either with wives or with colleagues. They were all signatories to the Official Secrets Act. Their knowledge was hardly shared, and only a handful of civil servants in Whitehall had anything that approached a full picture of their work, while the number of elected members of government who were trusted to be taken into their confidence was tiny, a small Cabinet sub- committee.
The Security Officer had been the rounds in the Intelligence Corps before being invited to quit two years before his army retirement date. He had held the rank of brigadier, with an O.B.E. as reward for 30 years of service. He had served in Aden, in Whitehall; he had been deputy to the senior intelligence officer at the Land Forces H.Q. at Lisburn outside Belfast; Germany for two tours; the Ministry of Defence again. He had been offered the position of Security Officer at Atomic Weapons Establishment. He was answerable to the Ministry of Defence and the Controller Establishments Research and Nuclear, but a call from Curzon Street was adequate cause for him to jump.
'Good morning, gentlemen, I very much appreciate your finding the time to attend, and at such short notice… '
In the Directors' dining room he most often ate alone because he came early to the table. He was joined only when there were no other chairs available. He had long ago realised that his office would leave him friendless and an object of suspicion. There was nothing formidable in his appearance, a bright bald scalp, small and close-set eyes.
'… Just a warning, nothing more serious. It has been brought to my attention, and I am duty bound to pass it on, that there is a remote possibility that the Atomic Energy Commission of Iraq may attempt to recruit personnel from the Atomic Weapons Establishment. I expect that sounds quite ridiculous… '
A chemist giggled. There was a general release of tension.
'… In my own view, not so much ridiculous as preposterous.
Some of you may remember talk a few years ago about the Iraqis putting together a nuclear device, and that led to the bombing of their reactor by the Israeli Air Force. Last year, of course, there were further rumours that the programme had been reactivated; unsubstantiated rumours. What has now crossed my desk is a somewhat unspecific warning that the Iraqis may be attempting to recruit top-grade scientists from abroad, and I would be failing in my job if I did not, without overemphasis, pass on that warning. Obviously, I am not for one moment imagining that any single one of you would entertain such an approach should it be made… '
There was a ripple of muttered conversation.
'… but I do ask that you come straight to me if any attempt is made to approach you. From what we read of recent happenings in Iraq, an individual would have to be clean off his or her whistle, certifiable, to entertain an offer, however lavish, from that quarter, but, as I say, we are warned. That's all, and thank you again for your time.'
There was laughter. The Security Officer smiled warmly. He had done his bit, and now he could return to the very much more pressing anxiety of vetting the construction workers from the Republic of Ireland currently employed on the fitting out of the A90 complex.
'That was balls,' Basil said. Boll was at his car door. He'd brought his keys out of his trouser pocket along with a fistful of change that was spinning in all directions on the tarmac.
'I beg your pardon.' On his knees now, reaching under the chassis.
Basil said, ' T h e man's an idiot, couldn't catch his own tail.'
'Who's an idiot?' Boll brushing himself down, finally unlocking the doors.
'Security officer. He implied that the Iraqis hadn't the tech-nology, the quality of workforce, the capability, that's just balls.
If he thinks we are the sort of people they'd be after, that's balls too. We're yesterday's men, Reuben, the administrators and the paper pushers. If they are serious, the Iraqis won't be looking for geriatrics like you and me, they'll be after the youngsters…'
Boll drove back to H area. He didn't speak. He was rather offended that Basil, the acknowledged brain of the Establishment, should regard him as geriatric. But he never quarrelled with Basil Curtis, because he, Reuben Boll, was one of the few who were privy to the tragedy of the man's life, who had known Basil's wife, who had comforted him after she had died at the wheel of her car. What love Basil Curtis still possessed was now vested in the
